Before the 2006 NFL draft, Gary Kubiak said Matt Leinart was "definitely a franchise quarterback and one of the best players in this draft."

The Texans coach didn't imagine that 4½ years later his team would sign the washout lefthander with the meager desire that he be better than Dan Orlovsky.

Heck, at the time, Kubiak had just signed off on David Carr being a Super Bowl-caliber, franchise signal-caller, with the right talent around him. (The 1975 Steelers perhaps? Because the '85 Bears wouldn't have been good enough.)

Still, Kubiak is one of the best at developing players at the most important position in football. Of course, it takes only a couple of successes to move into the top tier.

That isn't a shot at Kubiak. There are few absolutes when it comes to evaluating quarterbacks in the inexact science of NFL football where even first-round picks are more likely to fail than succeed.

Enter Leinart, the newest rat in Kubiak's QB lab. The former Arizona Cardinals first-rounder signed a one-year contract with the Texans on Monday. Can Dr. Kubiak fix what is broken?

Since he has been with the Texans, a number of quarterbacks have come and gone on Kirby. Matt Schaub has developed into a consensus top-10 NFL quarterback, and Sage Rosenfels is a top backup.

In Leinart, Kubiak is trying to turn a No. 2 QB into a ... oh yeah, a No. 2 QB. This could work.

It worked with Carr, now a backup with the 49ers. (Unfortunately for the Texans, Carr was their starter.)

Leinart isn't happy about his career taking such a downward turn, but he is ecstatic to sign with the Texans. Losing the starting job in a head-to-head competition with Derek Anderson is a far whine from being the backup to Schaub, who led the NFL in passing yards last season.

If Leinart wants to start in this league, he needs to take this as a learning experience and work his tail off so that Kubiak and general manager Rick Smith will tell the rest of the league how much they think of him next spring when he is looking for a job. And he will be looking, just as Rosenfels was in 2009 and Rex Grossman was this past offseason.

For now, with the season opener a few days away, all Leinart has to do is get up to speed and beat out Orlovsky for the No. 2 job.

Who knows how good Orlovsky was supposed to be — he was a fifth-round pick in 2005, when Leinart could have been the No. 1 overall pick had he left school early - but you don't have to shrink any bobbleheads to diagnose Orlovsky with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Detroit), thanks to a horrifying 0-16 experience.

Orlovsky a question

Kubiak claims he is confident in him, but does he really trust Orlovsky not to crash the Texans' high-powered offense should Schaub get hurt?

According to data from pro-football-reference.com, only once since the NFL went to a 16-game schedule (1978) has more than half the starting quarterbacks in the league started every game in a season, and that was in 1982, a strike year when teams played nine games.

If the Texans have to turn to Leinart or Orlovsky in the short term, all Kubiak would want from either would be to not crash the car.

So what if Leinart drives it like a little old lady from Pasadena?

(For you cheap-shot artists determined to look at this glass as half empty, this is where you mention that the last time Leinart took a team for a drive in Pasadena, a kid from Hiram Clarke showed him how to handle the wheel, and that kid is unbeaten against the Texans and scheduled to face them twice in the last five weeks of the season.)

Leinart's teammates didn't believe in him, and largely because of that, Arizona coach Ken Whisenhunt and he were on a different page. Now he has an opportunity to earn respect in a different locker room with a coaching staff that will give him a chance.

Kubiak is one heck of a coach. He can take a good quarterback and make him better, take an average quarterback and make him look good and take a terrible quarterback and make him less terrible.

Carr benefited

The latter is what he did with Carr, who led the NFL in completion percentage (albeit 2 yards at a time) in his one season under Kubiak.

So it doesn't really matter that Leinart isn't the franchise quarterback Kubiak thought he might be coming out of college.

For now it isn't even important if Leinart is good, average, flat terrible or perhaps misunderstood.

Kubiak is only trying to make a decent backup out of him. He can do that.